The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays

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THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS

AND OTHER PLAYS


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO




THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS

AND OTHER PLAYS



BY

WILLIAM B. YEATS

AND

LADY GREGORY



New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1908

_All rights reserved_


COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1908,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

New edition. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1908.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




PREFACE


About seven years ago I began to dictate the first of these Plays to
Lady Gregory. My eyesight had become so bad that I feared I could
henceforth write nothing with my own hands but verses, which, as
Theophile Gautier has said, can be written with a burnt match. Our
Irish Dramatic movement was just passing out of the hands of English
Actors, hired because we knew of no Irish ones, and our little troop of
Irish amateurs--as they were at the time--could not have too many
Plays, for they would come to nothing without continued playing.
Besides, it was exciting to discover, after the unpopularity of blank
verse, what one could do with three Plays written in prose and founded
on three public interests deliberately chosen,--religion, humour,
patriotism. I planned in those days to establish a dramatic movement
upon the popular passions, as the ritual of religion is established in
the emotions that surround birth and death and marriage, and it was
only the coming of the unclassifiable, uncontrollable, capricious,
uncompromising genius of J. M. Synge that altered the direction of the
movement and made it individual, critical, and combative. If his had
not, some other stone would have blocked up the old way, for the public
mind of Ireland, stupefied by prolonged intolerant organisation, can
take but brief pleasure in the caprice that is in all art, whatever its
subject, and, more commonly, can but hate unaccustomed personal
reverie.

I had dreamed the subject of "Cathleen ni Houlihan," but found when I
looked for words that I could not create peasant dialogue that would go
nearer to peasant life than the dialogue in "The Land of Heart's
Desire" or "The Countess Cathleen." Every artistic form has its own
ancestry, and the more elaborate it is, the more is the writer
constrained to symbolise rather than to represent life, until perhaps
his ladies of fashion are shepherds and shepherdesses, as when Colin
Clout came home again. I could not get away, no matter how closely I
watched the country life, from images and dreams which had all too
royal blood, for they were descended like the thought of every poet
from all the conquering dreams of Europe, and I wished to make that
high life mix into some rough contemporary life without ceasing to be
itself, as so many old books and Plays have mixed it and so few modern,
and to do this I added another knowledge to my own. Lady Gregory had
written no Plays, but had, I discovered, a greater knowledge of the
country mind and country speech than anybody I had ever met with, and
nothing but a burden of knowledge could keep "Cathleen ni Houlihan"
from the clouds. I needed less help for the "Hour-Glass," for the
speech there is far from reality, and so the Play is almost wholly
mine. When, however, I brought to her the general scheme for the "Pot
of Broth," a little farce which seems rather imitative to-day, though
it plays well enough, and of the first version of "The Unicorn," "Where
there is Nothing," a five-act Play written in a fortnight to save it
from a plagiarist, and tried to dictate them, her share grew more and
more considerable. She would not allow me to put her name to these
Plays, though I have always tried to explain her share in them, but has
signed "The Unicorn from the Stars," which but for a good deal of the
general plan and a single character and bits of another is wholly hers.
I feel indeed that my best share in it is that idea, which I have been
capable of expressing completely in criticism alone, of bringing
together the rough life of the road and the frenzy that the poets have
found in their ancient cellar,--a prophecy, as it were, of the time
when it will be once again possible for a Dickens and a Shelley to be
born in the one body.

The chief person of the earlier Play was very dominating, and I have
grown to look upon this as a fault, though it increases the dramatic
effect in a superficial way. We cannot sympathise with the man who sets
his anger at once lightly and confidently to overthrow the order of the
world, for such a man will seem to us alike insane and arrogant.